Hi, I have a Western Digital EIDE WD1000VE external hard drive and suddenly my computer stopped recognizing it – I have HP Compaq R3220 w/ Windows XP Home Edition. It either shows up as a local disk in Windows Explorer and in device manager it comes up as WDC WD10 00VE-00KWT0 USB Device, but I can’t access it even though the system assigns it a letter. Sometimes the Autoplay shows up as loading, but then it disappears. I tried plugging it into different USB ports, disabling and enabling it, re-installing it through the device manager – the installation says it was completed successfully. I also went to see if the driver needed to be updated – it didn’t. I also installed the WD Diagnostics and it passed the quick test, but no SMART status was available for it – instead of the green check mark it has a gray question mark. So the computer definitely sees something is plugged in, but it doesn’t recognize it… It does the same thing on other computers (PCs) as well. Any suggestions? Thanks so much!
